Honoring the Constitution Could Save
City Money
By Emmaia GelmanEmmaia Gelman
is making a documentary on human rights in Israel and Palestine.
She is an activist for AIDS, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
issues.

May 16, 2003

Last week I went to jail. Just for a day
-- it was a little message from the New York Police Department:
Dissenter, beware. I had been demonstrating at the Bureau of Immigration
and Citizenship Enforcement (formerly known as the INS) alongside
activists from immigrant and minority groups.

We were protesting the government's new
special registration requirement for Muslim immigrants, a big-brother
mechanism not seen since the government decided that Japanese-Americans
were "dangerous persons" in 1942. Under this new policy,
some registrants who've checked into the bureau have been unable
to check out - they've been caught up in what is called "administrative
detention," where they have no date for release or trial.

So last Monday, 42 of us sat down to block
the doors through which so many have disappeared. Civil disobedience:
a small, time-honored gesture of objection. We sat on the ground
with arms linked. Police threw us onto our stomachs, planted boots
in our backs and wrenched our limbs in directions they're not
supposed to go. Our wrists were cinched with plastic cuffs until
our arms were blue.

At the precinct we gave fingerprints and
identification to our arresting officers, and were marched out
singly for intelligence-gathering interviews. Cops had written
up summonses for about a third of us when the process suddenly
ground to a halt. No more tickets were issued, so we spent the
next 31 hours in jail, waiting to be arraigned on minor charges,
such as disorderly conduct, which rarely send people to prison
even if convicted. Could that be legal?

No. Last year the city paid me and 13 other
New Yorkers $469,000 in damages for a similar violation of our
rights. In 2000, with New York City still at war over the Amadou
Diallo shooting, we had been demonstrating at the Police Academy.
We wanted to make sure cadets learned the difference between a
wallet and a gun.
At the precinct, cops were writing up our summonses for future
arraignments when they halted. So we spent the next 26 hours in
jail, waiting to be charged with minor violations.

Our 2000 lawsuit charged that, in cases
of political protest, the NYPD abused its discretion by jailing
protesters without trial. City lawyers did not dispute the allegations
and eventually even turned up an NYPD document outlining the police
policy in writing. In addition to paying damages, the city agreed
permanently to rescind the policy that had held protesters overnight.

But in 2003, protesters against the war
in Iraq and the repression at home have encountered the same phenomenon:
protesters arrested regardless of whether they've violated a law.
Demonstrators held overnight on minor charges that carry no jail
time. Dissenters charged with seemingly random violations often
thrown out of court later. These are the practices of a police
force actively chilling dissent, deliberately raising the cost
of protest from hours to days.

Activists had hoped that Mayor Michael Bloomberg
would not perpetuate the expensive failed policies of Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, especially if the city faces such an enormous budget
crunch. Giuliani's trademark dissent-squelching practices are
under scrutiny in federal court - again. The NYPD is litigating
another set of "punishment of dissent" lawsuits, this
time facing off against me and nearly 400 other protesters illegally
detained between 1999 and 2001. Once again we find ourselves in
court to make the cops respect civil rights.

There's no sign that the NYPD plans to pull
back from the national trend of assaults on dissent. Worse, it
seems to be gambling that the current lawsuit will yield a new
legal precedent allowing the NYPD simply to preempt the First
Amendment. The city already faces a raft of new lawsuits arising
from anti-war demonstrations and protests against the targeting
of Muslims, Arabs and immigrants. The NYPD is already charged
with false arrest of protesters and bystanders, excessive detention,
violence against demonstrators and curtailing protest rights.
The Bush administration isn't finished making war on selected
enemies for political ends, or forking out billions in war contracts
to its corporate friends. And the Republican Convention is just
around the corner.

So there's a lot of dissent yet to be repressed.
And the price of protest keeps rising. How long before we just
can't afford to speak out?

If the city goes to trial and successfully
spins protesters as a "threat to homeland security,"
it can get 400 litigants off its back and at the same time muzzle
the right to speak out. Unchastened by the millions of dollars
paid so far to protesters abused on Giuliani's watch (more than
$1 million for the Matthew Shepard and Diallo protests alone),
the Bloomberg administration seems willing to do the same. The
city's lawsuit payout budget has been increasing annually. For
2003, they've budgeted $5.2 million. Of course, not all of it
is for paying off protesters, but certainly a more constitutional
policy regarding the right to free speech would save the city
money. Then maybe it could be funding libraries and schools instead
of jails.

After a couple of hours in the cold at the
recent anti-war rally, Annie Stauber, 59, felt she'd had enough.
Confined to one of the crowd-control pens on First Avenue, she
couldn't see a way to maneuver her wheelchair back to the street.
She rolled, instead, right into a blue wall of obstinacy, the
latest manifestation of the way the war on terror is corroding
the right of New York to be its obstreperous self.

The myriad tales of police hostility that
have gushed forth since February 15, when hundreds of thousands
of people took to the streets to protest a U.S. war against Iraq,
extend far beyond a few cops' bad-egg excesses. The police, the
courts, the city itself seem to have turned on New York's own
residents, as government agencies scramble for security in a perpetual
code-orange climate. Rather than providing orderliness and safety,
city responses to the demonstration at every level-from courts
denying demonstrators a permit to march, to cops blocking people's
way to the rally-created chaos and confusion. They cast Americans
exercising their democratic rights as, at best, a nuisance to
be contained and controlled, and, at worst, as potential terrorists.

As Stauber recalls, "I told a police
officer that I felt sick and needed to leave, but she said, 'You're
not going anywhere.' I told her I'm diabetic and need to check
my blood sugar, but she wouldn't let me out." When Stauber
tried to steer over to a corner where there might be an opening,
the officer, she says, grabbed the chair and "flung me around,"
leaving the wheels askew and bending the chair's control stick
so far out of Stauber's reach that she couldn't drive.

Nadia Taalbi, 20, a New School student from
Wisconsin, was excited to be going with a few friends to her first
political demonstration ever, but was thwarted at every turn.
"We couldn't get through all along Second Avenue," she
explains. "At 51st Street, a police officer told us to walk
uptown. Then at 53rd, another told us we had to go downtown."
So they stood on the corner for a few minutes trying to decide
what to do. Soon "this huge group started coming across 53rd
toward Second Avenue and we got pushed toward the cops. This officer
just turned around and full out shoved me. I've always had good
experiences with police officers. But I felt like I was being
attacked. He yelled right in my face, 'You have to start moving!'
I said, 'There's nowhere to go.' He grabbed my arm and my leg
right under my butt and picked me up-my feet were off the ground-and
started to push me into the crowd. Then he turned around and shoved
an old woman and she fell to the ground. Then he got out his stick
and started pushing me under my armpit."

Nancy Ramsden, 68, came to the rally with
her church group from Marblehead, Massachusetts, and found herself
terrified as she was crunched up against a store window next to
a woman with two small children when mounted police officers drove
their horses into the crowd. Cheryl Mantia, 23, a senior at NYU,
was arrested for stepping into the street when the sidewalk could
not hold the flow of demonstrators, and was held until 7 a.m.
on Sunday. She was frightened by the whole ordeal, but most disturbed,
she says, by an officer who called her a "cunt." When
she objected-"Hey, I have rights, you know," she said-he
replied, "Yeah, the right to suck my dick."

Stories like that have poured into the New
York Civil Liberties Union-according to executive director Donna
Lieberman, hundreds of people e-mailed within 48 hours of a call
for accounts of their experiences-and many of them will be related
Tuesday at City Council hearings investigating the city's handling
of the rally: A woman doing her damnedest to follow orders and
stay on the sidewalk was picked off and arrested when her foot
slipped from the curb. A man trying to explain to thrusting police
that there was nowhere to go received the retort "Go to Iraq."
Meanwhile, footage collected by New York's Independent Media Center
captures cops spewing pepper spray into a crowd from inches away,
and using metal barricades as weapons to press protesters-including
elderly people-back.

Police spokesperson Mike O'Looney dismisses
such alarming scenes: "You don't see what led up to them,
what provoked them." One thing only, according to people
who went home with bruises and stinging eyes: the effort to exercise
their constitutional right to protest by assembling on First Avenue.

Last week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg defended
the city's refusal to grant protesters a permit to march across
Manhattan, telling the Voice's Wayne Barrett, "It
doesn't seem to me you're sacrificing so much as long as you can
assemble." But tens of thousands of people-maybe more-couldn't
assemble. Cops wouldn't let them get through, and then attacked
and arrested them for trying.

O'Looney insists that the NYPD did a fine
job-they'd handle things the same way again, he said, when asked
whether hindsight offered some suggestions for an improved approach-and
many with criticisms put the failures down to management mishaps.
"This is not a yahoo police department," says NYU law
professor Jerome Skolnick, a specialist in police behavior. "But
it's common when you have tens of thousands of people to have
communication breakdowns. People being told to move north want
an explanation. Police are not in a position to explain. They
just want to tell you to go here or go there, and tempers fray."

But protest organizers, lawyers, and scores
of demonstrators say they witnessed problems that run far deeper-and
that are far more troubling-than the rudeness, overzealouness,
and occasional violence from individual officers that often surface
at demonstrations in New York City. They see a pattern-and even
a policy-of civil liberties infringements that does not bode well
for a democracy, especially in a time of unpopular war.

"I'm not given to conspiracy theories,"
says Leslie Cagan, co-chair of United for Peace and Justice, which
organized the rally. "But the denial of the permit to march,
the refusal to let us set up portable toilets, the requirement
that we get a building permit to put up a backstage tent, the
insistence on using the pens, the difficulty of negotiating every
detail, which I've never experienced in more than 20 years of
doing this work-with all this I can't help but think they wanted
to deter people from demonstrating."

In more obvious ways, those who braved the
confusion and obstacles and demonstrated anyway seem to have gotten
subsumed into the city's anxious efforts in the war on terror.
Among the hundreds arrested (police put the number at 272; attorneys
count 342), most were kept for eight, 12, 15 hours-far longer
than is usually required to process those accused of minor violations.
Demonstrators recounted that while they were in custody, police
asked them not only their names and addresses, but what organizations
they were affiliated with and where they were located. Some say
they were even questioned about their opinions of the 9-11 attacks.
(O'Looney says he was unaware of that kind of questioning.)

Bruce Bentley, co-chair of the Mass Defense
Committee of the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild,
couldn't even get into 1 Police Plaza the night of the arrests,
and gave up trying after almost two hours of waiting outside in
the cold. "Did they try to keep lawyers out to continue these
interviews?" he asks. "I can't prove it." But he
does reckon that a recent court decision lifting the so-called
Handschu restrictions for police spying on activists played a
role. "The Handschu ruling was a signal to go ahead with
this," he suggests.

Norman Siegel, a veteran defender of protesters,
was permitted to see only 10 people in three hours down at 1 Police
Plaza. "The denial of access to lawyers was more severe than
anything I've seen before," he says. NYPD spokesperson O'Looney
replies, "We went out of our way to make arrangements for
people to meet with their clients."

Out on the streets, protesters met with
Big Brother. Josh Roberts, 23, a carpenter from Fitchburg, Massachusetts,
attending his first rally, pulled a bandana out of his pocket
when the wind off the East River got to be too much, and wrapped
it over the lower half of his face. His friend did the same with
a tan handkerchief. "We were just hanging out watching the
speakers on the television monitors and out of the blue this guy
in plain clothes hops over the railing next to me and tells a
cop to come over by the railing and they order me to show them
my ID. I showed him and so did my friend, and we saw he was writing
our names and license numbers down on this sheet of paper."
At the top of the page, printed in sharp black letters, Roberts
saw the title "Counterterrorist Intelligence." Roberts
asked him what it was all about "and he's like, 'I can't
tell you that.' I said, 'Hey, don't you think this is harassment?'
and he said, 'If you want to see harassment, I'll pull you over
this barricade and kick your ass in front of your girlfriend.'
"

Research conducted several years ago by
Skolnick and his colleague James Fyfe-now deputy commissioner
for training for the NYPD-showed that police-community relations
erode when police departments take on a war footing. They argued
that such programs as the "war on drugs" and the "war
on crime" encourage cops to regard citizens as enemies rather
than as people they are meant to serve and protect. Is the war
on terror doing the same?

Skolnick says that not having been at the
rally, he cannot assume the cops were thinking like soldiers that
day.

But those who were in attendance certainly
didn't experience the police as facilitating the event.

If anything, police are becoming ever more
militarized. Frank Morales, a researcher for Covert Action
and other publications, has chronicled how "civil disturbance
training" of military units and law enforcement has been
under way for years, and was stepped up in response to the WTO
protests in Seattle in 1999. Since 9-11, he says, the blurring
of boundaries between military and police operations "is
more consolidated and out in the open."

That's not always how police were meant
to function. Indeed, urban policing came into being in the 1820s,
when Sir Robert Peel formed the British "bobbies" precisely
to shield protesters from a military that was violently putting
down peaceful demonstrations of the unemployed, rallying for jobs.
But today, local police are being drawn ever more fully into the
endless global war on terror. Who will protect the dissenters
now?

Mayor Bloomberg may love the way the NYPD handled the February
15 anti-war rally, but how do photographers who covered the rally
rate the NYPD? Lensmen expect a certain amount of roughing up
at rallies, even a broken lens or two, but some are calling this
one too rough. Photogs from Britain and Maine felt disrespected
and the Daily News complained that police mistreated two
of its staff photographers. At times, police denied photographers
access, forcing them into some areas and out of others, particularly
when arrests were under way. Some cops viewed anyone with a camera
as a target for verbal or physical aggression.

There is a smoking gun behind these allegations:
photos of police pushing a Daily News photographer, taken
by New York-based freelance photographer Rob Bennett. (One of
Bennett's shots appeared on page two of the February 16 Daily
News, and more of the photographs can be viewed here.)
The News reported that staffer Susan Watts was photographing
police making arrests at the intersection of 53rd Street and Third
Avenue when, according to Watts, "a cop charged at me and
put his hand over my lens and pushed me down to the ground."
The accompanying photo shows a uniformed officer with his arm
stretched toward Watts as she falls in the street. Watts was not
hurt, but one of her cameras was ruined.

In a statement, News spokesman Ken
Frydman announced that the paper has "complained in writing"
to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly about how police treated
both Watts and News photographer James Keivom. (Keivom
was ticketed for disorderly conduct at the rally.) According to
Frydman, Kelly has assured the News that "these incidents
are being thoroughly investigated in two separate investigations."
The News is "pleased" by the response so far
and "does not believe these incidents reflect a pattern of
behavior." Watts and Keivom declined to comment. NYPD spokesman
Michael O'Looney confirmed that an Internal Affairs investigation
is under way.

The police definitely used "rough tactics,"
said Peter Coltart, a 24-year-old photographer who traveled from
Maine to New York to cover the rally. Coltart, who carries a press
pass from the Lewiston Sun Journal, spent several hours
in the packed blocks of the East Fifties, watching police push
the demonstrators around. "Sometimes when I put a camera
up, they'd be more careful," he said, "but other times
if I tried to take a picture, they would either put their hand
up or tell me to move along."

Coltart claimed that one officer knocked
him down three times and another picked him up off the street
and threw him. The first incident occurred at an intersection
where protesters were densely packed on the sidewalk, facing a
line of cops on foot and on horseback. The police were pushing
people back so buses and cranes could come through. "I was
standing there taking photographs," he recalled. "Me
and the cop were facing each other and the cop said, 'You've gotta
move.' " The next thing he remembers is, "I got knocked
down by a police officer. I was on the ground, got up, and got
knocked down again. I was knocked down three times and trampled
on by other protesters."

Later, Coltart arrived on a side street
where protesters had begun a mass sit-down. Police were telling
people to get up and arresting them if they did not. "I saw
this guy lying down getting arrested," Coltart recalled.
"I ran out toward the street, got on my stomach in front
of the guy, and popped off two frames. Then all of a sudden, I
was floating. A big cop reached down-he must have weighed over
200 pounds. I weigh 150. He grabbed my jacket with one hand and
picked me up. I kept shooting. He threw me back into the crowd.
I don't think I landed on my feet."

The NYPD had its own photo staff at the
rally, equipped with digital and video cameras. Indeed, one of
Bennett's photos shows a cop with a video camera trained on Susan
Watts. "They had complete freedom to take pictures of whatever
they wanted," Coltart noted, "but when we took photos,
they pushed us down."

For some cops, verbal harassment seemed
to suffice, as when a member of the police press office ordered
a newspaper reporter to leave a tense scene. The reporter, who
asked to remain anonymous, recalled he was standing on the sidewalk,
talking on his cell with his NYPD press pass in full view, as
police surrounded a group of protesters and forced them against
a building. Suddenly an officer started yelling, telling him to
get off the block. The reporter objected at first, then left.
Moments later, he said, "the same officer came up and said,
'You'll never wear one of my credentials again.' "

Another target of intimidation was Paul
Mattsson, a 42-year-old from London who contributes to the photo
agency Report Digital. Mattsson, who has covered demonstrations
for 20 years, said, "I've been hassled, beaten up, shot at,
and arrested. I've had cameras smashed by police and protesters.
But nobody has ever told me that I'm not allowed to do my job."

Two days before the rally, Mattsson went
to the press accreditation office of police headquarters to apply
for a temporary NYPD press pass. He showed two press cards, one
issued by the British National Union of Journalists and recognized
by the British police, the other issued by the International Federation
of Journalists. But, he said, the man behind the counter looked
at him and said bluntly, "You can't work here."

The day of the rally, Mattsson said, the
organizers gave him credentials that allowed him to work in the
enclosed area surrounding the stage. Then he saw the man he met
at police headquarters doing a press check. Again the man told
him, "You can't work." The man directed Mattsson to
a police press bus, where other officers helped him get where
he wanted to go.

Later, Mattsson asked for permission to
cross a roadblock. He said that as he was taking out his international
press card, one officer began tapping his baton and "gesticulating
with it" in a threatening way, refusing to let him proceed.
"Do you speak English?" the officer asked. Later, at
other roadblocks, the police "kept giving me grief [about
his credentials]. They would not tell me where there was a clear
way around. I spent two hours going in a circle. . . . I missed
a lot of the action I came to cover."

NYPD lieutenant Elias Nikas said the department
does not issue temporary press passes, but British journalists
did attend the rally and had their cards honored. As for Mattsson's
being told, "You can't work here," Nikas said, "that
doesn't sound right."

Every journalist interviewed for this story
met some cops at the rally who were "very nice," "sensitive,"
and "down to earth." But that doesn't excuse the cops
who think it's necessary to control photographers with aggression.
.

See more shots of Daily News
photographer Susan Watts being knocked down here

August 8, 2003

New York Times Judge Criticizes Police
Methods of Questioning War Protesters By BENJAMIN WEISER

A federal judge in Manhattan criticized
police officials yesterday for the way demonstrators against the
war in Iraq were interrogated earlier this year, and he made clear
that civil liberties lawyers could seek to hold the city in contempt
of court in the future if the police violate people's rights.

The judge, Charles S. Haight Jr. of Federal
District Court, who recently eased court-ordered rules on police
surveillance of political groups, made his comments after hearing
evidence that the police had asked the protesters their views
on the war, whether they hated President Bush, if they had traveled
to Africa or the Middle East, and what might be different if Al
Gore were president.

"These recent events reveal an N.Y.P.D.
in some need of discipline," Judge Haight wrote, citing what
he called a "display of operational ignorance on the part
of the N.Y.P.D.'s highest officials."

In his ruling, Judge Haight cited comments
in the news media by the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly,
that he and his deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen,
were unaware that the police were using what they called a "debriefing
form" in the questioning.

"The two commissioners should have
known," the judge wrote.

In February, Judge Haight agreed to modify
a longstanding court order that had restricted the Police Department's
ability to conduct surveillance of political groups. Police officials
had said they needed greater flexibility in investigating terrorism,
and the judge agreed to ease the rules, citing "fundamental
changes in the threats to public security."

The original rules were known as the Handschu
agreement, named for the first listed plaintiff in a 1971 lawsuit
over harassment of political advocacy groups by the Police Department's
so-called Red Squad.

Yesterday, Judge Haight did not impose new
restrictions on the police in the wake of the interrogations,
which first came to light after the New York Civil Liberties Union
received complaints from protesters. Nor did the judge decide
the issue of whether the interrogations violated the protesters'
constitutional rights.

But he said he would formally incorporate
the recently eased rules into a judicial decree, to make clear
that lawyers could return to court and seek to hold the city in
contempt if they believed that a violation of the rules also violated
an individual's constitutional rights.

"This approach gives the plaintiff
class an increased protection warranted by recent events without
unfairly burdening the N.Y.P.D.," the judge said. The ruling,
he added, should not "unduly trouble the N.Y.P.D., which
I will assume is not engaged in thinking up ways to violate the
Constitution."

Jethro M. Eisenstein, a lawyer for the plaintiffs,
said that the judge made clear "that these rules are not
window dressing."

"They're actual rules, they limit what
the Police Department can do, and if the Police Department goes
beyond them, they face the risk of being held in contempt,"
he said, adding that contempt power can result in swift fines
and imprisonment. "You don't have to start a lawsuit and
reinvent the wheel."

Commissioner Kelly, who said he had not
read the entire ruling, noted that the judge had not altered the
recent modifications for which the Police Department had petitioned,
"so it allows us to go forward."

"I think significant for us, the modifications
that were made stay in place," the commissioner said.

Gail Donoghue, special assistant to the
city corporation counsel, said, "The city feels that the
decision has not adversely impacted on the N.Y.P.D.'s ability
to remain proactive in the investigation and prevention of terrorism."

The New York Police Department has been
slappedfor its "operational ignorance" and its threat to
constitutional rights.

Charging he had lost confidence in the NYPD's
methods of investigating political activity, a federal judge yesterday
restored limits on the department that he had lifted only five
months ago.

[In February the judge had agreed to ease
the rules restraining police surveillance and interrogation excesses
out of concern about heightened threats to security. The original
rules have come to be known as the Handschu agreement. Handschu
was the first listed plaintiff in a 1971 lawsuit which succesfully
charged that the Police Department's so-called Red Squad harassed
political advocacy groups.]

Blasting the department at its highest levels,
Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Haight reversed his March ruling
in which he had accepted the Police Department's assertion that
terrorism concerns justified an easing of the restrictions.

Haight said he changed his mind after the
disclosure that on Feb.
15the police had arrested 274 people protesting the war
in Iraq and questionedthem about their political beliefs, entering their responses
on what the department called a "demonstration debriefing"
form. Remarkably, the NYPD seems to believe nothing has really
changed in the guidelines they must observe. At a news conference
yesterday, [Police Commissioner Ray] Kelly said that Haight's
ruling would "not change any modification made by the judge
... For me, the important thing is the modification ... continues
to stand."

Chris Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties
Union said of Kelly's statement, "I don't know what the commissioner
means since the judge clearly ordered that new restrictions will
be added to the court order governing the department's surveillance."

The judge's ruling did not specify what
restrictions would be imposed in initiating a probe. Neither the
Newsday story nor the NYTimes account leave us with any
clear understanding of the impact of the judge's ruling yesterday.
Yesterday, Judge Haight did not impose new restrictions on the
police in the wake of the interrogations, which first came to
light after the New York Civil Liberties Union received complaints
from protesters. Nor did the judge decide the issue of whether
the interrogations violated the protesters' constitutional rights.

But he said he would formally incorporate
the recently eased rules into a judicial decree, to make clear
that lawyers could return to court and seek to hold the city in
contempt if they believed that a violation of the rules also violated
an individual's constitutional rights. [from the Times ]